Chapter 17 - ELIANA’S LETTER
I waited until Neriah was older to read Eliana’s full letter to me.
The court released it years earlier.
I could not.
At forty-five, I finally did.
Declan,
If you are angry with Prisca, do not make anger your new mother.
I laughed through tears.
Eliana.
Always irritatingly precise.
She wrote:
You avoid conflict until pressure becomes unbearable, then you become decisive all at once. That is useful in emergencies and terrible in families.
My slap.
Exactly.
Then:
Do not teach Neriah that courage means exploding after silence. Teach her that small boundaries spoken early are stronger.
I read slowly.
She knew me better dead than I had known myself alive.
Then:
If our daughter ever finds the keys, I failed to make the system boring enough.
I laughed aloud.
The keys were never meant as treasure clues.
They were redundancy.
Legal security.
A woman making sure one administrator could not erase original documents.
No adventure.
Paper backups.
Then one line:
May you like
I hope by the time Neriah is grown, none of this matters because Sutton Ridge has learned to govern itself without needing family heroes.
That became the next goal.
